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By Root 760 0

and fumbling in his thoughts for some way to salvage the situation, started forward. As usual, it was the dragonmen who saved him. All at once, they burst into action, hurling themselves at the distracted Vaasans. The first sword-taker and another warrior fell instantly, and the work site erupted into a maelstrom of violence even more confused and ferocious than the first. Melegaunt saw a pair of saurians springing in Bodvar's direction and took the first out with a bolt of shadow, but the second was too quick. This one bowled the chieftain over on the run and lashed out for Idona, then a half-dozen other melees drifted between Melegaunt and the young wife, and he lost her.

He rushed forward swinging sword and spraying shadow, but the battle was as mad and confused as it was quick. Before he could find Bodvar again, he had to slay two dragonmen and use a spell of shadow-grabbing to keep from being dashed lifeless on the rocks at the base of his own cliff.

When Melegaunt did find the chieftain, he wished he had not been so quick to save himself. Bodvar was standing in the midst of a bloody pile of Vaasans and dragonmen, holding two broken swords of steel and searching the carnage around with a look of utter terror on his face.

"Idona?"

Bodvar found a female leg kicking at the ground from beneath a dead dragonman and used a boot to roll the white-scaled corpse away, but it turned out that the leg belonged to the mother who had grabbed one of the swords to defend her children.

He turned away from her without comment and called again, "Idona?"

"There," rasped someone. "They've got her." Melegaunt spun toward the speaker and found a pallid-faced sword-bearer pointing across the work site to a small knot of fleeing dragonmen. They were just starting down the trail toward the boulder walk, each one with a limp Vaasan body slung over its shoulders. The last body in line was that of Bodvar's young wife, her throat ripped out and her head dangling by the spine alone, her blue eyes somehow still locked on Melegaunt's face.

"No!" Melegaunt gasped. He laid a hand on Bodvar's shoulder. “I’m sorry, Bodvar. Sorry beyond words."

"Why? You have what you came for." Bodvar reached down to Melegaunt's scabbard and drew the last dark-sword, then turned to start after his dead wife. "You have your twenty souls."

Liar's Game

Jessica Beaven

The Year of the Starfall (1300 DR)

At the edge of a city in Faerun, a sewer main empties into the swamp. The light reaching inside gives way quickly, any who enter must proceed by touch. Deeper, the sewage grows thicker. It sucks at one's calves. Deeper still, and the refuse is dry. The procession from wet to dry challenges the very imperative that water must flow downward. And yet the sewers go even deeper. Debris has come to rest here: a shoe with a foot decaying in it, a head wedged against a pipe protruding from the floor, worse.

With no heavenly bodies to mark its passing, time loses meaning. A drip falls, then fades into the past, dripping forever in its moment.

The pipes give way to catacombs. Sounds of weeping fill the close air.

From one corridor, light issues, it seeps from the walls. Shifting animal forms inhabit this hall. Bars and wire hold them in, stripe their features. Some of the creatures look normal-cats shivering in shelved cages, mongrels drooping, even a lion cramped in a forward-sloping cell, its hide pressed into the bars.

The weeping creature in one of the larger cells has retreated to a corner to express its grief. Only fur is visible. For some reason, it stops crying and shifts.

It is another cat-or rather, two. One is joined to the other, exactly upside-down on its back-head melting into head, hip into hip, one tail twitching against another limp one. The piggybacker is motionless, legs flopping, tongue protruding, yellow eyes glazed an inch or two above the green ones. The living cat is lacerated, so that its intestines have spilled from its middle and drag behind it upon the floor.

This corridor is long. It passes into more corridors with small carry-cages abandoned